The Great Apes Survival Partnership (GRASP) will seek to monitor the illicit traffic in chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and bonobos with the creation of a Great Apes Illegal Trade Database that will support law enforcement and conservation efforts around the world.

The Great Apes Illegal Trade Database was announced on November 6 at the Interpol-United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) International Environmental Compliance and Enforcement Conference at UNEP headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya.

The creation of a database was a key recommendation of the recent UNEP-GRASP report, Stolen Apes, which estimated that nearly 3,000 great apes are lost from the forests of Africa and Asia each year.